Egg Freezing’s False Promises

Today’s New York Post features an article highlighting a new low in the exploitation of women: egg-freezing parties.

Sponsored by EggBanxx, the event targeted young professional women in Manhattan encouraging them to freeze their eggs as a means to free them to pursue their careers and wait until they find Mr. Right to have children.

One 32 year old attendee left the event excited about her newfound freedom: “I don’t want to keep thinking about my biological clock . . . I’d rather store my eggs now while they are young and healthy and use them when I’m older, say around 39.”

According to the article, EggBanxx lists its prices for egg freezing at $6,500-$7,500—almost fifty percent cheaper than their competitors. But one has to wonder if these young women are being sold on false promises.

As Jennifer Lahl has outlined, egg freezing neither guarantees a baby nor is it risk free.

And, as Jennifer highlighted, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine

states that the age of a woman when her eggs are frozen plays a significant role in later embryo implantation rates. Women who froze their eggs using the slow freeze method before age thirty have an 8.9 percent ‘likelihood of implantation per embryo,’ which declines to 4.3 percent if eggs are frozen after age forty. For women who used the newer vitrification method, the implantation success is 13.2 percent for embryos created from eggs that were frozen at age thirty. That drops to 8.6 percent with eggs frozen at age forty. And these are just the implantation rates, not the live birth rates.

While these young women sat around sipping champagne and toasting their freedom to push off childbearing, it’s hard not to think that the real celebration was taking place behind the scenes by those in the fertility industry that were about to cash in on the promise of children that they know they can never ensure.